Second thoughts on the Democratic leadership

Image by Getty Images North America via @daylife

In May, I wrote that Democrats likely would keep control of the House because their leadership has been politically competent. I still stand by that analysis. Certainly Speaker Pelosi and her team have been more astute than Speaker Hastert and his cohorts were in 2006, which admittedly is a low bar to claim.

Yet I will concede an obvious point: I ought to have qualified my conclusion more than I did.

I should have noted that Pelosi and co. made passing health care reform more difficult than necessary by passing the bill in the House before the Senate. By going that route, she ensured that House Democrats would be forced to take a tough vote on the public option, which progressives like but conservatives and many independents loathe.

And certainly I should have noted, as Paul Kane and Shailagh Murray did today, that Pelosi relived the 1993 BTU-tax debacle by passing cap and trade in the House without getting assurance that the Senate would even take the bill up for a vote. Voting for a carbon tax will not play well in the Rust Belt, states that have been hit hard by the recession and are the home of manufacturing plants (though a version of the bill seeks to exempt such plants). As Kane and Murray wrote of Pelosi’s political maneuvering,

Pelosi won over wavering Democrats such as Boccieri and Reps. Mary Jo Kilroy (Ohio), Baron P. Hill (Ind.) and Zack Space ((Ohio) — each of whom faces a difficult reelection — after intense negotiations designed to soften the blow of the initial proposal. The House bill would place new production costs on power plants, factories and oil refineries, requiring U.S. emissions to decline 17 percent by 2020. Creating a commodities market, the bill would require polluters to buy “credits” to cover their emissions; Midwestern farmers, among others, could sell “offsets” for pollutants they didn’t emit.

But lofty talk about the securing the future of the planet is not likely to win over many voters who have lost their jobs.

In Boccieri’s northeastern Ohio district, the manufacturing decline has been sharp and painful. Ten years ago, there were 45,000 manufacturing jobs in the Canton-Massillon region. By spring, the number had been cut nearly in half, to 24,000, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Boccieri said he knows his constituents are focused on the present. “All the average voter wants to know is, ‘When my refrigerator is on, are my rates going to be lower or higher?’ “

I continue to think that the conventional wisdom in Washington that Republicans are all but guaranteed to take over the House is wrong. Let’s see if the GOP can put up a sufficient number of strong, well-funded challengers. I’m doubtful. But hey, in politics anything can happen in three months.